Nicolae: The Rise of Antichrist; pp. 242-244
Two desperate men on the run. One of them is a fugitive from corrupt authorities and the subject of a nationwide manhunt. They’re driving all night, racing across the desert to the border, where they have no idea how they’ll get past the guards.
None of that is particularly original, but it shouldn’t be boring. A subplot this derivative has dozens of not-boring examples to be derived from. All Jerry Jenkins needed to do here was to copy and paste from any of the movies or TV shows or pulp novels that have covered this same ground, then add a bit of mysterious-ways/stepping-out-on-faith to put his own religious twist on it. Think Midnight Run, crossed with one of those sermon-illustration anecdotes implausibly embellished from a missionary biography. Yeah, that’s formulaic, but that’s the point. It’s like baking — stick with the formula, the formula works.
It doesn’t work here because Jerry Jenkins is too bored and distracted to give us a scene that’s anything other than bored and distracted. He’s typed up many of the elements of a paint-by-numbers adventure, but he can’t quite be bothered to finish the painting. He and his author-substitute, Buck Williams, drift off into daydreams:
In spite of his nervousness, in spite of his fear, in spite of the distraction of driving in unknown, dangerous territory with a less-than-desirable conveyance, suddenly Buck saw it all laid out before him. He wouldn’t call it a vision. It was simply a realization of the possibilities. …
Buck’s prescient (non)vision of the future is meant to remind readers that God has a plan for them. If you just pray and open yourself to God’s leading, then God will guide you to realize the possibilities and live the life that God has plotted for you. Christian discipleship is thus like being a character in a bad novel in which the sovereign author preordains the plot and strips the characters of all agency. Once again, bad theology begets bad writing, and vice versa.
Suddenly he knew the first use of the secret shelter beneath the church. He envisioned Tsion there, supplied with everything he needed, including one of those great computers Donny Moore was dolling up.
(Maybe it’s because of the whole Nic Cage thing, but I can’t help but hearing Buck’s dream of the future internal monologue in the voice of H.I. McDunnough from Raising Arizona.)
For Buck and Jenkins, computers are swell. They’re almost as neat as telephones.
Jenkins typed the first book in this series in 1995. He typed this one in 1997. We see him here trying to get a grasp on the rapidly developing new technologies that were just coming into their own in 1997, trying to envision what might become of this exciting new Interweb thing that all the kids were talking about back then.
Again, there’s a sense in which we need to cut poor Jenkins some slack here. He wrote this book in the early stages of a time of revolutionary technological change. People were just starting to dial up and click around on Netscape and Yahoo. Everybody had a copy of the Yellow Pages — a thick book filled with the landline phone numbers of video stores and travel agencies and print media. And most people expected that would still be true 20 years later. The full implications of the Web were, for most of us, unforeseeable and unforeseen.
But there’s also a sense in which all of that shows why we shouldn’t cut any slack for Jerry Jenkins and Tim LaHaye. The whole premise of this series is that they know what the future will be — with absolute, inerrant certainty. And the main thing that Tim LaHaye has been telling us about the future is that there won’t be one. So far, he’s been wrong about that for decades.
Buck grew excited just thinking about it. He would provide for the rabbi every software package he needed. He would have the Bible in every version, every language, with all the notes and commentaries and dictionaries and encyclopedias he needed. Tsion would never again have to worry about losing his books. They would all be in one place, on one massive hard drive.
The problem here isn’t just the shaky grasp of technology, but the utter confusion about what Tsion Ben-Judah’s activity as a biblical “scholar” might involve. We’ve been told that Tsion has mastered all the original languages of the Bible, so why would he need “the Bible in every version”? Jenkins seems to imagine that being a biblical scholar means reading a Bible verse in the King James Version, and then in the NIV, and then in Jerusalem Bible, and then perhaps (cautiously) in the NRSV, in the hopes of gaining some revolutionary new insight into the text (a text which, LaHaye & Jenkins repeatedly assert, is supposed to be self-evidently unambiguous and clear for any literal reader of good faith). Reading multiple English translations can be useful for laypeople who can’t read the Hebrew or Greek original, but Tsion doesn’t need every available English translation to study the Bible. He doesn’t need any English translation, actually.
Also, at this point in Nicolae, we’re nearly two years into what is obviously and undeniably the Great Tribulation, precisely as described in Tim LaHaye’s variant of premillennial dispensationalist lore. All that remains of history is a little more than five years of seals and trumpets and vials of wrath, culminating in Armageddon and the return of Warrior Jesus, rocks fall, everybody dies, etc. So it’s not clear to me that any further research, study or scholarship is necessary at this point.
Once you have confirmed that you are, in fact, trapped in the nightmare of a Tim LaHaye novel, you don’t require a vast theological library to help you navigate what little remains of your future. All you need is one of LaHaye’s books or booklets. Just the Big Chart and checklist would be enough, really. That would provide more than any other “scholarship” or “research” could tell you. All you need to know is what’s coming next. The war has started. Check. What’s next? Famine and pestilence. Then what? Locusts and then an earthquake? Or is it earthquake then locusts?
All that stuff in all the “commentaries and dictionaries and encyclopedias” isn’t going to be necessary or helpful. Plus, if the world around you proves that LaHaye was right, then you already know that 99.99 percent of what’s in those commentaries is wrong. The footnotes in a Scofield Bible may be helpful, but Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, Wesley, Matthew Henry, et. al., have all proven themselves to be irrelevant at this point.
Tsion’s “research” is supposed to pick up where Bruce Barnes left off, but I’m afraid I still don’t have any idea what it was that Bruce was supposed to be doing locked up in his church study all day. I picture him emerging late at night, bleary-eyed, stumbling into the lobby of the church where Loretta is sorting water filtration kits, MREs, potassium iodide tablets, and ammunition. “I’m exhausted,” he tells her. “I’ve plowed through the first four volumes of Church Dogmatics, but I still haven’t found anything in there that will help me to pinpoint a precise date for when the sun shall become black as sackcloth and the stars of heaven fall unto the earth, even as a fig tree casteth her untimely figs. … I’m starting to think that Barth won’t be any help at all.”
The vision from God/the authors that Buck won’t call a vision continues:
And what might Donny come up with that would allow Tsion to broadcast surreptitiously on the Internet? Was it possible his ministry could be more dramatic and wider than ever? Could he do his teaching and preaching and Bible studies on the Net to the millions of computers and televisions all over the world? Surely there must be some technology that would allow him to do this without being detected. If cell phone manufacturers could provide chips allowing a caller to jump between three-dozen different frequencies in seconds to avoid static and interception, surely there was a way to scramble a message over the Net and keep the sender from being identified.
That bit almost works here due to Jenkins’ close identification with Buck as his Marty-Stu surrogate. We don’t have to be disappointed with Jenkins’ lazy refusal to do research beyond dimly recalling what he once heard from some guy about, like, untraceable cell phones and stuff. We can just attribute that hazy laziness to Buck himself. That leads us to an opposite conclusion from the one the author intended — seeing what Jenkins’ meant as a display of Buck’s tech-savvy as, instead, an illustration of his incomprehension — but at least it gives us a way of imposing sense on a passage that otherwise wouldn’t provide any.
I’m distracted, though, by this idea of Tsion Ben-Judah’s Dark Web YouTube channel. He’ll be the Max Headroom of the Great Tribulation. (The experience of reading this book is improved if you mentally cast Matt Frewer in the role of Tsion.) But, more importantly, will Tsion enable comments on these Bible-prophecy broadcasts?
In the distance Buck saw GC squad cars and trucks near two one-story buildings that straddled the road. The buildings would be the exit from Israel. Up the road would be the entrance into the Sinai. Buck downshifted and checked his gauges. The heat was starting to rise only slightly, and he was convinced if he drove slowly and was able to shut off the vehicle for a while at the border crossing, that would take care of it. He was doing fine on fuel, and the oil gauge looked OK.
He was irritated. His mind was engaged with the possibilities of a ministry for Tsion Ben-Judah …
And that, right there, is why this whole Race Across the Border subplot winds up being so surprisingly dull. Jenkins and Buck would both much rather be daydreaming about other things — high tech gizmos and secret broadcasts from an underground hideout. Having to deal with the actual escape across the border is, to both of them, “irritating.”
The escape itself — Buck having to do it, Jenkins having to describe it — is an irksome bother that neither of them is willing to give his full attention.
Buck didn’t want to face a border crossing. He wanted to sit with a yellow pad and noodle his ideas. He wanted to excite the rabbi over the possibilities. But he could not.
That’s not just Jenkins telling us that Buck would rather be doing something else. That’s Jenkins telling readers that he would rather be doing something else — anything other than having to go through all the irritation and bother of actually typing up the end of this little adventure.
This isn’t storytelling. It’s a writer confessing that he’s annoyed by having to tell stories. That’s kind of weird, but still mostly just boring.
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